If you can’t scale, you do not have a chance.

This is about Ruby on Rails. Not meant to start a flamewar, and not written to bash it. It is just that some of my concerns are not only mine apparently. When I wrote about Rails framework before, I was fond of the productivity it brought. Especially with the support for Ruby in Netbeans, ROR becomes a nice framework. However, scalability and other stability, enterprise features in general are required in our age. You can go ahead and read about the scalibility features of ROR all around the web, I did so.

What you have to be ready is to be able to quickly provide solutions. You have to have an idea about how to scale from 200 requests a day to 200k in a week. With Java and .NET, I have that. Especially with Java. I can be running on Tomcat, and I can switch to JBoss to have clustering, load balancing, whatever I need. I can use NLB with Windows servers, switch to COM+ etc..

The point is these are very well tested solutions to scaleability problems. They have been proved for a lot of cases. The news is that ROR is having a hard time these days, for a very well known site, Twitter might be abandoning ROR. When you search for scaling Ruby on Rails, you’ll probably come across something that contains references to Twitter.

I’ve switched from ROR to J2EE for my project, and I’m happy I’ve done so. Yes, my backend code is not as efficient to write as Ruby, but I’ve been successful at responding to requests quite quickly, and most important of all, I am facing possibility of scaling to a much larger level, but I have no question marks about how to do that. I guess feeling confident that I have well proven methods to scale matters more some times. I guess JRuby becomes very important in this context since it can run ROR and it can scale using J2EE infrastructure. Let’s see what’ll happen in this front.